In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Plotinus actively engages with the notion of sacred space and mystical initiation (Enn. 1.6.7–9). He presents the individual soul as a self-sculpted statue in the temple of the One. He returns to the temple/statue imagery to explicate its ontological syntax: the One as the god inside the temple; Intellect as the first statue in the temple’s precinct; the intelligible as living temple, Soul as constructing images of gods in the sensible world; finally, the individual soul as a sculptor and a statue. The series of references presents the intelligible itself as a self-animated divine complex. For Plotinus, animation is the top-down process of emanation which results in self-animation. Because animation is embedded in the ontological fabric of the universe itself, theurgy and ritual animation of statues are, for Plotinus, ontologically superfluous.

In this paper I outline a number of ways Jewish philosophy, Neoplatonism, and Islamic scriptural exegesis (tafsīr) interact with each other in the writings of Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī. Taking into account the wealth of mystical texts accessible to philosophers of his time period (12th cen. CE), I show how these texts attempt are used by him to model the intelligibility of the natural world. While some of the most famous cases include the Sefer Yeṣira and its commentary by Saʿadya Gaon, or the lettrism of al-Ḥallāj and other earlier Ṣūfī’s, there are lesser well known and still as deeply influential modelling techniques. Such techniques include the atomism of Ashʿarite kalām; the substance-theory of Plato and Aristotle, the eclecticism of Galen’s humoral theory, as well as the numerological theories of Evagrius and Ps.-Hippocrates’ Hebdomads. I argue that Abū l-Barakāt is a case of combinging these models to develop a theologically pregnant understanding of nature as the "Scroll of Existence".

n this paper, I wish to try to reconstruct the mystical scenes of intimacy in Plato’s erotic dialogues, taking cues from other mystical literature, including the Divan of the 13th century Persian poet, Rūmi, and the Enneads of Plotinus. I especially draw on Plotinus’ mystical interpretations of the Symposium’s erotic imagery, especially as we find them in Enneads I.6, III.5, VI.7, and VI.9. 

In his Mathnawī-i ma‘nāwī, Rūmī offers a view of the apparently inanimate—such as minerals, stones, and mountains—as rather being alive, in love, and in prayer. Far from being a sentimental projection onto the natural world, Rūmī offers a robust epistemology in which spiritual realization deepens intellectual perception. Those who know God are also those who truly know the world, thereby witnessing, for example, a tree’s prayers, a stone’s invocation, and the love of all cosmic beings for their Beloved. In other words, those who are spiritually realized are more capable to perceive nature in her true state, dispelling the illusion of inanimateness and unveiling an animate spiritual life of the “inanimate.” The condition for encountering nature as “thou” rather than “it” is the encounter with the Divine “Thou,” which necessitates a transformation of self for seeing the world as it really is. 

This paper addresses Thomas Traherne’s notorious theme of ‘want’ as it appears in the Centuries of Meditation - the desire and want of God for human beings and the symmetrical desire and want of human beings for God. For all its rhetorical and poetical flourish, Traherne’s meditations on want are shown to be rooted in the Platonic tradition of eros and have their precursor in Pseudo-Dionysius’ model of mutual yearning between God and humanity. This theme is examined through Traherne’s inheritance of the Neoplatonic structure of procession and return and the Thomistic metaphysics of efficient and final causality. Traherne ultimately urges towards configuring the divine-human relationship in terms of  reciprocity and reciprocal desire. 

Recent scholarship has highlighted how modern religious education remains shaped by Protestant assumptions about what religion is and how it should be studied. Drawing on Jenny Berglund’s concept of the Protestant “marinade” of Scandinavian religious education, this paper analyzes Norwegian RE textbooks published after the 2020 curriculum reform (LK20). The reform partially sought to move beyond the traditional “world religions paradigm,” but textbook analysis demonstrates that religions such as Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism continue to be constructed through categories historically derived from Protestant Christianities, including scripture, doctrinal belief, and theological concepts such as salvation and messianism. These frameworks implicitly position Christianity as the normative model for understanding religion and therefore present other traditions through a Christian lens. The paper concludes by proposing a pedagogical shift to relocate these categories within the study of Christianity, allowing other traditions to be presented through categories more closely aligned with their own internal logics.

This dissertation project focuses on developing an integrative approach to values education for Islamic Religious Education (IRE) in Germany. In a pluralistic society, teachers face the complex challenge of reconciling genuine Islamic theology and normative teachings with socio-political educational mandates. This study addresses the research gap at the intersection of ethics and Islamic religious pedagogy. As a solution, the legal-philosophical concept of maqāṣid (intentions of Sharia) is didactically modeled. Methodologically, the work combines discourse-analytical hermeneutics with a qualitative content analysis of core curricula (North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg). Embedded within a Design-Based Research (DBR) framework, the research aims to construct and test a criteria-oriented guideline as an educational intervention. This theory-driven, real-world approach empowers Muslim students to develop religious dialogue and judgment skills, contributing to peaceful coexistence in a secular constitutional state.

This paper analyzes the regulatory, surveillance, and operational infrastructures in the US and France that affect religiously oriented private, independent, or otherwise alternative-to-public schooling projects. Rather than strictly comparative, a juxtapositional approach is used for this analytical review to better observe the contrasts and surprising "overlaps between, across, and within” these different systems (author redacted). I argue that these divergent systems reflect each country’s relationship with religion, as well as undergirding national attitudes about whether parents or the state is most responsible for the education of children. With an eye toward the future of education, this analysis offers insight into trends emerging in both countries, which converge with respect to demands for increased diversity of schooling options, and diverge in terms of what kinds of options come to fruition. 

This paper examines how freedom of conscience is configured in postcolonial Hong Kong’s curriculum, focusing on the Ethics and Religious Studies (ERS) subject as a hinge between constitutional guarantees and classroom practice. Drawing on a distinction between freedom of conscience and freedom of religion (Trigg, 2010; Maclure & Taylor, 2011) and on debates about “Asian values” in education (Bell & Ham, 2003; Cummings, 1996; see also Pye, 1985), I argue that Hong Kong’s Basic Law and denominational school system offer thick protections for religious institutions while providing thin safeguards for students’ autonomy—the right to believe, not believe, and change belief. Through qualitative analysis of ERS curriculum guides (2007, 2014, 2019, 2024) and Basic Law articles, paired with comparisons to Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, and Thailand, the paper shows how school systems promote civility, harmony, and orthodoxy while leaving conscience largely implicit, and sketches what a conscience-centred religious education might entail.

Early in Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989), the line “baptize me in coconut oil and cum” reworks the language of Black Protestant ritual into a queer invocation of spirituality and desire. Read alongside Joseph Beam’s anthology In the Life (1986), this paper argues that Black queer cultural production draws from, subverts, and reconfigures Black religious forms rather than existing outside them. It reads Tongues Untied as both an extension of and response to Beam’s earlier call for Black gay self-representation in In the Life. Their titles signal this relationship: Tongues Untied invokes Pentecostal glossolalia and the refusal of silence, while In the Life names Black queer community in language resonant with sanctified existence. Through testimony, Riggs and Beam mobilize Black Protestant rhetorical forms to voice Black queer life during the AIDS crisis. Together, these works stage Black queer expression as a liturgical practice of voice, body, intimacy, and communal witness in a moment of imminent death.

In recent years, the profile of Courage International, the Catholic Church's official apostolate to gay, lesbian, and bisexual Catholics, has risen both in public discourse and within the Vatican itself. This paper explores the historical and ideological development of Courage, along with the testimony of liberation that many gay men claim to have found through the organization. Ultimately, this paper suggests two problems with the Courage model. First, the liberation Courage offers is predicated upon anti-trans and anti-queer violence. Second, Courage's theology of grace is nothing less than a betrayal of the Catholic theological tradition. In conversation with Hanna Reichel, Micah Cronin, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Raher, and Elizabeth Johnson, this paper suggests the contours of a theology of queer grace that could form a foundation for greater solidarity among LGBTQ+ Catholics.

This paper examines how a particular strand of Black gay consumer culture has become complicit in its own surveillance through what I term "predictable desire." Drawing on Michel Foucault's theory of internalized power, Simone Browne's genealogy of anti-Black surveillance, and Denise Ferreira da Silva's critique of the "transparent-I," the paper argues that the normalization of Black gay desire—expressed through repetitive aesthetics, digital performance, and aspirational consumption—renders Black gay subjects, particularly the ‘butch queen,’ mathematically predictable and therefore controllable. Against this condition, I propose a Christian practice of mystical discernment, rooted in Howard Thurman's mysticism and Georges Bataille's theory of sacrifice, as a mode of radical detachment. Reading Matthew 5:29–30 theologically and phenomenologically, the paper calls for a thoroughgoing destabilization of the sedimented self—not self-destruction, but an ecstatic, Spirit-led dispossession that disrupts the surveillance economy by making the Black gay subject harder to track, to sell, or to contain.

This paper examines the MAGA movement as a theological and temporal struggle over the meanings of history, progress, and national belonging in the United States. By invoking a nostalgic vision of a mythic American past, MAGA political discourse often frames movements for racial justice, immigration reform, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights as evidence of national decline rather than democratic progress. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s theory of decolonization alongside the liberationist theologies of Gustavo Gutiérrez and James H. Cone, the paper interprets these conflicts as struggles over colonial memory and the haunting presence of unresolved histories of slavery, racial violence, and exclusion. Engaging the theme of “Haunting Future/s,” the paper develops a Pan-Africanist Fanonian pneumatology of liberation in which ancestral memory and diasporic spiritual practices challenge Christian nationalist narratives and reimagine the ethical promise of the Kingdom of God.

Indigenous communities globally have produced a precise but unstudied diagnostic figure: a human outsider who extracts vital substance from invaded communities and commodifies it through transcontinental networks. This paper proposes the term extractivore—extraneous, excessive extraction and consumption—as the analytic capable of including the myriad historical iterations of this figure while excluding its common conflations with supernatural or chthonic beings. Following a Derridean pharmakon approach to the social sciences, religious studies uniquely enable this analysis by taking seriously what secular-scientific commitments foreclose: the prophetic traditions that diagnosed extractivorism before colonial contact materialized it, transmitting ancestral warnings as memory-work and future-work alike. Reviewing key cases from Central Africa, the Andes-Amazon region, and Native North America through this lens reveals that extractivorism haunted colonial futures before they arrived—spectral presences named in advance of their necropolitical embodiment—and that the countermeasures these traditions prescribed constitute the most rigorous antiextractive methodology available to contemporary scholars.

Are ICE renditions reminiscent of slave patrols or Nazi Gestapo? The answer to this timely, critical question is a bilateral yes. Comparisons of ICE and DHS tactics which link them to the consolidated police power of Nazi Germany and to slave patrols in the United States bear much fruit by way of historical analogy. Yet one must also recognize the white supremacist political theology shared by both of these historical precedents if one is to appreciate the gravity of ICE renditions in the 21st century. This paper explores the anti-Black necropolitical theology of chattel slavery and demonstrates its genetic link to Nazi fascism through Jim Crow, before demonstrating the continuity of both with contemporary secret police in the US. The paper simultaneously traces the role of white Christian nationalist imaginaries that, in turn, must give way to a Christian abolitionist politics of friendship. 

Theologies of conversion are haunted. Christian conversion exists in a complex temporality, haunted by echoes of the past and specters of the future. Hauntings are recognized by their ghosts. This paper will identify three kinds of ghosts that evidence how conversion is haunted. Engaging with Elaine Enns and Ched Myers’ Healing Haunted Histories as well as Homi K. Bhabha’s “Our Neighbours, Ourselves” essay, this paper will examine the ghosts of conquest, ghosts of doubled identity, and ghosts born out of conversion. Identifying these ghosts and reckoning with their ambivalent hauntings enables conversion to regain a sense of complexity, which will open up possibilities for how it can become a more useful resource in theological inquiry as we find our way to “futures for which we hope.”

This paper examines the way Puerto Rico’s neocolonial status reverberates from the myth and political memory of its first elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín. By examining the theological import of Muñoz Marín’s poetry, political rhetoric, and his party symbol this paper demonstrates how el jíbaro became synonymous with the governor and how he became a messianic figure against which Puerto Rican leaders are evaluated (whether in formal political office or not); even artists like Bad Bunny cannot escape the specter of Muñoz Marín. To imagine a future for Puerto Rico, therefore, begins by contending with the long and institutionalized shadow of its first governor. This paper deconstructs the mythology around Muñoz Marín’s history, ideology, and political project, before briefly proposing a Puerto Rican future rooted in Afro-diasporic spirituality (life in the Spirit).  

This study examines the goddess Kisshōten as an embodiment of female sovereignty in early to medieval Japanese Buddhism, emphasizing how her female body functioned as a medium of political and spiritual authority. Tracing her origins to the Hindu deity Lakṣmī, Kisshōten inherited associations with fertility, beauty, and queenship, which were re-expressed in eighth-century Japan through statuary, ritual practice, and Buddhist texts offering instructions for creating and worshipping her image. Her divine body was central to repentance rites and temple art, allowing devotees to experience her presence ritually and materially. Powerful Fujiwara women, including Empresses Kōmyō and Kōken (later Shōtoku), actively promoted Kisshōten’s worship, using her female form as a model to articulate and legitimize their own authority. Through hidden statues, mandalas, and ritualized images, Kisshōten’s body operated as both a symbolic and material medium of female-centered rulership, shaping ideals of sovereignty, power, and gender in Nara-period Japan.

The 1,000 life-sized statues of Senju Kannon in the thirteenth-century Sanjūsangendō temple in Kyoto contain hidden votive deposits—dhāraṇī texts, moon disks, and images of the bodhisattva—dating to the hall’s original construction in 1164. Placed inside the hollow statues, these materials form a concealed ritual layer complementing the hall’s multiplicity. This paper argues that the hall functioned as a space for esoteric ritual, where the retired emperor Goshirakawa (1127–1192) could ritually align his body with the bodhisattva through the “three mysteries.” The deposits correspond to mudrā, mantra recitation, and visualization practices, materializing esoteric ritual logic within the statues themselves. The hall integrates human, sculptural, and divine bodies into a network of correspondence, enacting a political theology in which sovereign authority is embodied. By linking visible multiplicity with hidden ritual objects, Sanjūsangendō emerges as a site where ritual, material culture, and political power converge through the shared language of the body.

This paper examines Aki no yo no naga monogatari (“A Long Tale for an Autumn Night”), a late medieval narrative that recounts the tragic relationship between a Tendai monk and a youthful monastic acolyte (chigo). Despite it’s the sophistication and complex visual program in the illustrated scrolls preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the work has received limited attention. The paper argues that the work deploys the body of the chigo as a medium through which notions of gender, desire, and religious meaning are articulated. The chigo is a liminal figure whose feminized beauty—marked through tonsorial, sartorial, and physical semiotics—renders his body both an object of attraction and a divine presence. The narrative further associates him with the natural envinronment, and with Ishiyama Kannon, an androgynous being. The paper will show that Aki no yo is important for understanding conceptions of the body in medieval Japanese religion.

This study examines the goddess Kisshōten as an embodiment of female sovereignty in early to medieval Japanese Buddhism, emphasizing how her female body functioned as a medium of political and spiritual authority. Tracing her origins to the Hindu deity Lakṣmī, Kisshōten inherited associations with fertility, beauty, and queenship, which were re-expressed in eighth-century Japan through statuary, ritual practice, and Buddhist texts offering instructions for creating and worshipping her image. Her divine body was central to repentance rites and temple art, allowing devotees to experience her presence ritually and materially. Powerful Fujiwara women, including Empresses Kōmyō and Kōken (later Shōtoku), actively promoted Kisshōten’s worship, using her female form as a model to articulate and legitimize their own authority. Through hidden statues, mandalas, and ritualized images, Kisshōten’s body operated as both a symbolic and material medium of female-centered rulership, shaping ideals of sovereignty, power, and gender in Nara-period Japan.

The 1,000 life-sized statues of Senju Kannon in the thirteenth-century Sanjūsangendō temple in Kyoto contain hidden votive deposits—dhāraṇī texts, moon disks, and images of the bodhisattva—dating to the hall’s original construction in 1164. Placed inside the hollow statues, these materials form a concealed ritual layer complementing the hall’s multiplicity. This paper argues that the hall functioned as a space for esoteric ritual, where the retired emperor Goshirakawa (1127–1192) could ritually align his body with the bodhisattva through the “three mysteries.” The deposits correspond to mudrā, mantra recitation, and visualization practices, materializing esoteric ritual logic within the statues themselves. The hall integrates human, sculptural, and divine bodies into a network of correspondence, enacting a political theology in which sovereign authority is embodied. By linking visible multiplicity with hidden ritual objects, Sanjūsangendō emerges as a site where ritual, material culture, and political power converge through the shared language of the body.

This paper examines Aki no yo no naga monogatari (“A Long Tale for an Autumn Night”), a late medieval narrative that recounts the tragic relationship between a Tendai monk and a youthful monastic acolyte (chigo). Despite it’s the sophistication and complex visual program in the illustrated scrolls preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the work has received limited attention. The paper argues that the work deploys the body of the chigo as a medium through which notions of gender, desire, and religious meaning are articulated. The chigo is a liminal figure whose feminized beauty—marked through tonsorial, sartorial, and physical semiotics—renders his body both an object of attraction and a divine presence. The narrative further associates him with the natural envinronment, and with Ishiyama Kannon, an androgynous being. The paper will show that Aki no yo is important for understanding conceptions of the body in medieval Japanese religion.